1993 Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Text to Context (London: Routledge).

This collection of essays contributes to the field of hypertext and cyber-culture studies, which has developed in parallel with the Internet and the World Wide Web over the past ten years. Its main purpose is to elaborate and apply to the field a new rhetoric that would be suitable and original. Or, as Espen Aarseth puts it in the introduction to ''Aporia and Epiphany in Doom and the Speaking Clock: The Temporality of Ergodic Art'': ''The race is on to conquer and colonize these new territories for our existing paradigms and theories, often in the form of 'the theoretical perspective of [fill in your favorite theory/theoretician here] is clearly really a prediction/description of [fill in your favorite digital medium here]' '' (). Aarseth is right in claiming that the theme of poststructuralist ''influence'' on the development of computer-supported hypertext is exhausted by now and that it is time to think of a new theoretical language, one that will provide the appropriate description and explanation for this Brave New World called Cyberspace in all its varieties (see Marie-Laure Ryan's introduction to the collection). As a part of this project, Aarseth proposes the term ergodic in order to distinguish between computer-supported art (''produced by some kind of cybernetic system, i.e., a machine [or a human] that operates as an information feedback loop, which will generate a different semiotic sequence each time it is engaged'' [–]) and other types of artistic discourse, which are often compared to it without actually being ''ergodic.'' The same trend is represented by Marc Poster's ''Theorizing Virtual Reality: Baudrillard and Der-rida.'' Poster criticizes the automatic applications of Baudrillard's theory of simulation to virtuality, demonstrating the difference between Baudrillard's position and the actual state of virtual reality. According to Poster, neither Baudrillard nor Derrida provides the concepts needed for the analysis of new technologies. The articles by Aarseth and Poster belong to the first part of the collection , which is focused on terminological problems. Another article in this first part (''Virtual Topographies: Smooth and Striated Cyberspace'' by Marc Nunes) looks for the appropriate precursors of cyberspace. Nunes demonstrates how the metaphors of smooth and striated space used by